Kerry James Marshall

Born 62 years ago in Birmingham, Alabama, Kerry James Marshall was eight years old when the KKK bombed a Baptist church, killing four girls. He would go on to live in Los Angeles during the Watts riots, and later Harlem and the South Side of Chicago.

"All those things had an impact on shaping the person that I am," he told CBS News' Alex Wagner. "It's sort of inescapable. But those are a small fraction of the kind of experience you have on a day-to-day basis."

Credit: CBS News

"Bang"

"My introduction to art history was like everybody else's; you see an art history book that has works by Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The first art museum I even went to was the L.A. County Art Museum. We went there on a field trip when I was in school. And so the things you see in there reflect the things that I saw in the books I was looking at in the library. And so this is where you get a picture of what art is and what [a] museum is, as a place that's a repository for all of the best things that people have made.

"So while I was walking through there, looking at Rembrandt and everybody else, I didn't see a lot of images of black people in there. Yes, these things are great. But I don't see a reflection of myself in any of these things I'm looking at. And I would like to."

Pictured: "Bang" (1994) Acrylic and oil on unstretched canvas.

Credit: Courtesy of the Progressive Corporation

"Vignette"

"Vignette" (2003). Acrylic on fiberglass.

Credit: Adam Reich/Defares Collection

"Plunge"

"I would say most of us, if not all of us, are pretty aware of the history of black people in North America," said Marshall. "We're used to hearing narratives of trauma, tragedy, disenfranchisement, pain, suffering. And it's often been said that we spend too much time focused on those kinds of stories, and that there are few of the stories that normalize the everyday life of people who are not always experiencing trauma 24/7.

"And there was a point at which I decided I just didn't want to be focused on that alone, to the exclusion of everything else. And in the long term, if there's a struggle, then at the point at which you stop struggling, then you've got to replace the struggle with something. And that thing that it's replaced with has to feel normal and natural and inevitable."

Pictured: "Plunge" (1992). Acrylic and collage on canvas.

Credit: Photo courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

"Could This Be Love"

Pictured: "Could This Be Love" (1992) Acrylic and collage on unstretched canvas.

Credit: Private collection, Courtesy Segalot, New York.

"De Style"

Marshall says a lot of his works are reflections of his own experience. "So I'm really painting painting aspects of my own life.

"What does a whole human being mean? Well, it's a person who is at once idealistic, realistic, political, funny, emotional, resilient, vulnerable -- all those different aspects of a human being. And I think those things need to be represented as well as anything else that we read about in the newspaper or we see on the news."

"Many Mansions"

"Supermodel"

Wagner said, "Your paintings are full of different hues. But the black is very specific. You use three different kinds of black in your work: carbon black, ivory black and mars black."

"The fact that every one of those black colors is differently named means they are different from each other," said Marshall. "So what you might perceive to be a fairly limited or monochrome tonality, there's variety at the outset. So you start with not sameness, but richness."

Pictured: "Supermodel" (1994). Acrylic and mixed media on board.

Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"School of Beauty, School of Culture"

"What distinguishes those colors from each other has something to do with the minerals or the chemicals they were made from. Mars black is not called mars black for nothing. If we think about what Mars is, the Red Planet, that mars black is a red color. If you put that on top of a carbon black, the redness in it becomes obvious, and they separate themselves from each other. You can look at 'em in the jar, they look the same. You put one on top of the other one, immediately the red that's in the mars black becomes apparent.

"The carbon black, it's like coal. You know, the bone black, it's charred calcium. They're not going to look the same, because they come from different things. And that chromatic variation is what I try to exploit in my paintings, so that the black paint in the painting is treated exactly the same way the blue paint is or the green paint is or the red paint is."

"That basic idea that blackness is not an anti-color, but a vibrant color?"

"That's an important distinction that needs to be made," he said.

Pictured: "School of Beauty, School of Culture" (2012) Acrylic on unstretched canvas.

Credit: Birmingham Museum of Art

"Untitled"

"Untitled" (2009); Acrylic on PVC panel.

Credit: Yale University Art Gallery

"Believed to be a Portrait of David Walker (ca. 1830)"

"Believed to be a Portrait of David Walker (ca. 1830)" (2009). Acrylic, PVC.

"Scout (Boy)"

"Past Times"

Wagner commented on Marshall's workman-like attitude towards his art; "That's not the way we think of artists," she said.

"Well, I don't know why it's not," he laughed. "Why wouldn't that be the case? Part of it is the myth of what it means to be an artist, which is based on this inspirational model: they're struck by some special insight, and because of a certain sensitivity in who they are as a human being, they are able to express this thing, and other people then become attached to it. That's not how I see it. Leonardo da Vinci was a workman. These people were doing a job for somebody, and they were trying to use their imagination to make the thing they did as spectacular as they could. If you think about any kind of an enterprise that human beings engaged in, what is the thing we're trying to do? We're trying to distinguish ourselves from other individuals."

"Souvenir I"

"And yet when people see your art, they oftentimes find something transcendent and deeply emotionally resonant in it, despite the sort of workman-like provenance of it," said Wagner.

"Well, to the degree that when I make work, on some level you could say it's about something that I think is important enough to pay attention to. I mean, life is complex. Life is complicated. It's like, what does it mean to be whole human being? Well, to be a whole human being means that you don't ignore any of those dimensions of who you are. You try not to suppress any of those aspects of who you are."